


marrow to marrow

by acronymed



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Background Bughead, F/M, alternate season 2 timeline, background varchie, how they really should have dealt with penny, jughead continues to be A Mess, veronica lodge does not have time for anyone’s shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-08 18:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13464099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acronymed/pseuds/acronymed
Summary: Really, she only finds out because her father is apparently keeping tabs on Archie.“I’m sorry,” she says, setting her fork down, “he didwhat?”“Took a rather late-night trip to Greendale.” Her father looks far too pleased with himself. “Now, what sort of business could he possibly have had there?”Or: Veronica learns about the Penny Peabody situation and Deals With It so Jughead doesn’t have to. AU from 2x07.





	marrow to marrow

**Author's Note:**

> because the writers continue to neglect these two (although it’s getting better) and it is a TRAVESTY.

“I’m sorry,” she says over dinner, setting her fork down, “but he did _what_?”

Her father shrugs, spearing a piece of steak far more aggressively than need be. For some reason, Archie’s a sore spot for him. She wonders if it’s because of Fred Andrews and her mother. “He drove that boy, Jughead, to Greendale at an alarmingly late hour several nights ago.” He chews thoughtfully, face carefully blank, but Veronica knows better. “What business could they have possibly had out there?”

Her mother looks exasperated. “Hiram.”

Veronica frowns at her food. Archie hadn’t told her about any late-night, impromptu road trips with their local Donnie Darko to _Greendale_ of all places. Come to think of it, Betty hadn’t mentioned anything either. She wonders if she even knows.

“I don’t need a play-by-play of every aspect of Archie’s life, unlike _some_ people,” she says dryly, slanting her father a look. “I’m his girlfriend, not his handler.”

Her mother smiles into her wine glass when her father stabs another piece of steak almost viciously. Veronica rolls her eyes.

But she wonders.

  
.  
.  
.

  
Archie, for all that he’s a terrible liar, won’t budge when she wheedles him over the next few days. Betty actually doesn’t know anything, and her eyes are curious bright when she mentions it, so Veronica hopes maybe she can get it out of Jughead.

Except Betty can’t, and Archie is dodging her, and Veronica suddenly doesn’t think this was just a casual late night drive to strengthen their bromance and now she has _questions_.

She figures the best way to deal with it is to go right to the source.

“Oh, God,” Jughead says, when she corners him smoking behind Pop’s on a Friday night waiting for his dad’s shift to finish, “did you break a nail? I’m not driving you across town to get it fixed again.”

“That was _one_ time and I broke my finger not my nail, you heathen,” she grumbles, and then checks her nails out of habit. He chuckles, low and scratchy, and puts out the cigarette with the toe of his boot. Betty doesn’t know he smokes, and Veronica only knows because she caught him out here once. Sometimes he shares one with her in moments like this, when no one else is around and they can just stand together and let their darkness settle in them. They have a weird not-friendship, she thinks. They’re more alike than either of them care to admit. “Actually, I wanted to ask you about Greendale.”

He stiffens, his whole body winding tight, and Veronica immediately knows something dangerous is up. “What about it?”

She circles his bike so she’s standing near the bars, the flare of her hip pressed against the cool metal. He slants her a look from under his lashes. Jughead Jones is devastating under dim street lamps like this, the high points of his face sharp and shaded gold in the light. Veronica squints at him. “Why did Archie drive you out there during the witching hour last week?”

“Road trip.”

“Bullshit,” she deadpans. “Try again, Grunge Pinocchio.”

Jughead snorts and rubs a hand over his face roughly. “I can’t say.”

“Well, I won’t take no for an answer.” She resists the urge to hop on his bike and cross her legs, the way she always does when she’s negotiating with her father. She settles for leaning against the seat, instead. “So I suppose we’re at an impasse.”

He glares at her, with no heat. Follows the lines of his bike to the swell of her hip and then up, up to her face. Growls. “You’re not going to move until I tell you, are you?”

 _Or you move me yourself_ , she thinks, but doesn’t say. Her and Jughead have this strange thing about physicality — as in, they don’t touch each other ever unless someone is _dying_. Like Cheryl, on the ice, when she’d clutched his hand for dear life, or when Fred had ended up in the hospital and they’d hugged Archie as one and Jughead had been planes of hard angles and jutting hips at her back. “Nope.”

Jughead exhales heavily. Leans on the bike next to her so there’s an inch of space between them. Not touching, never touching. “I went to this lawyer, when my dad was in jail. To find out what I could do for him, you know?”

Veronica can already tell this story is going to go south because if she’s learned anything from her parents, it’s that lawyers are always looking for something other than what they give you. “How heroic of you.”

“Yeah, well,” his fingers tap a rhythm against the leather seat, off beat, “she gave me advice, and then my dad found out and he _flipped_. Told me she was bad news and not to talk to her again. So I didn’t.” He inhales sharply here. “Until she called me from an unknown number and I picked up.”

“I already want to hit you,” Veronica mutters. “Please tell me you told her she had the wrong number and hung up.”

Jughead has the sense to look guilty and ducks his head. Veronica wants to rub a hand over her face but also doesn’t want to smudge her makeup. “Continue.”

“She convinced me my dad had been jumped in prison,” he mumbles. The toe of his boot twists into the concrete, and he looks so _young_. Sixteen, terrified, desperate. She knows those feelings too well. “Told me I needed to do something to help him out.”

Veronica doesn’t press. This all sounds eerily similar to her own experiences with her parents, honestly.

Jughead’s fist clenches on the seat, brows knitting. “Archie drove me to Greendale, and then I met up with this Stephen King serial killer-esque guy and we moved a crate.” He closes his eyes. “That was, unknown to me, full of drugs.”

 _I’m going to murder her_ , Veronica thinks viciously, because there are parts of Riverdale that make her long to do nothing more than raze it all to the ground. She grits her teeth. “Let me guess,” she snarls, “she has video proof of it and is now blackmailing you for the foreseeable future?”

Jughead blinks up at her. “How did you—?”

“Blackmail is my family’s specialty,” she says darkly, already rolling through all the ways Penny Peabody could be associated with her father. Jughead must pick up on where her thoughts are heading, because he turns his upper half towards her and leans in slowly.

“Hey,” he says gently, breath puffing in little clouds between them. Veronica presses her lips together tightly and frowns at his chin. “She has a vendetta against my dad, Elsa. I can guarantee your parents aren’t involved.”

 _You know my insecurities too well_ , she muses, staring at the mole near the corner of his mouth. “Then maybe it’s time they are.”

He catches her wrist, lightning quick, his arm a liquid whip in motion. “No.”

Her skin burns at all the points his fingers touch, a searing heat that spreads up her arm, into her chest, lower. She sucks in air through her teeth, pretends it’s in annoyance. “Why? She’s blackmailing you, Jughead.”

“My dad can’t find out,” he says desperately. “He _can’t.”_

“He _won’t.”_ She leans in closer than she needs to, catches a whiff of sweat and cigarette smoke and something minty fresh. “Lodges are excellent at secrecy.”

“Please, Veronica.” He’s still holding her wrist carefully, like she’s made of glass and he’s scared he’ll shatter her, his thumb warm on the inside of her wrist. Veronica stares at his throat, the way it moves as he swallows hard, the hard bump of his Adam’s apple, how his skin is so enticingly soft. This is why there’s always so much distance between them. This odd, crackling energy that pulls at them, threatens to bring them too close. “Don’t tell anyone. _Please_.”

His voice is the sort of pleading she’s never heard from him before. When she flicks her eyes up to his, she’s caught by how close he is and the nearly delirious thought that he might kiss her. He keeps looking at her mouth, blinking, and looking away. Over and over and over.

“Okay,” she says, because something about alleys and him in his leather jacket always makes her promise him stupid things; things like this and not telling anyone he smokes or that he tried to call his mum in Toledo to stay with her once and she shut him down. “I won’t.”

But she’s lying, she knows she is.

She’s a Lodge, after all.

.  
.  
.

“I thought you wanted me to be honest.” Her father is raising one eyebrow at her and leaning back in his chair. “ _Dealing_ with a drug dealer, as you put it, hardly seems the sort of thing a good samaritan would do, mija.”

 _Liar,_ Veronica thinks, because they’re Lodges and honesty is a rarity to them, a commodity they have no use for when they spend their time with sharks waiting for blood in the water. Honesty makes you weak and vulnerable. Honesty makes you do things like go to your dad to protect your best friend’s boyfriend. Your boyfriend’s best friend. Your… something or other.

She settles into the armchair across from him and folds one leg over the other. “Do you remember how angry I was when you came home?”

Her father sighs. “How could I forget?”

Veronica bites the corner of her lip. “I was ready to write you off forever.” He stiffens, here, the thought of a life without her love in it a harsh thing. “I didn’t want to give you another chance. I was convinced you were never going to change, and a year or two down the road I was going to wake up one morning and you would just be gone.”

“Veronica, I swear—”

 _I won’t get caught again_ , she finishes for him, but says instead: “Jughead’s the one who changed my mind.”

Her father stops. Blinks twice. “Pardon?”

Veronica flicks her gaze to the painting behind him. She’s always hated it — it’s a constant reminder of who she was, when it was commissioned: a shallow, vapid party girl with too much money and no compassion or warmth in her for anyone. He’d once said it kept him honest. She wonders if maybe, instead, it’s to remind him of what he’d made her. “His dad was facing a hard jail sentence. Archie’s dad had just been shot. I was a mess, and he just…” She shrugs. “He was there to talk and he told me if there was even an iota of a chance, I needed to take it. I owe him.” Then, more forcefully, “ _you_ owe him.”

Her father is quiet for a long time, brows drawn. Then, low and rough, that sort of protective growl he’d get when something happened to her: “What was this woman’s name again?”

Veronica smiles, her old smile, her scorched-earth smile. The smile in the picture looming over her father’s shoulder. The one with no kindness in it. “Penny Peabody.”

.  
.  
.

Jughead’s writing in the back booth of the diner with his headphones on when someone slides in across from him. He startles, nearly slamming his laptop shut out of habit, and looks up.

Hiram Lodge is sitting across from him.

 _Oh shit,_ he thinks, and goes through all of his interactions with Veronica the past week — they hadn’t bickered any more than usual, he hadn’t said anything too mean, he definitely hadn’t done anything inappropropriate except maybe that thing that had happened in the parking when she was hounding him about Penny and _oh god_ he was going to die—

“Jughead,” Mister Lodge says dryly, “breathe. This isn’t The Godfather.”

“Uhm.” Jughead makes a strangled noise and tries again. “What can I do for you, Mister Lodge?”

Mister Lodge watches him. Jughead sees his eyes flick from the raw edges of his jacket to the frayed end of his headphone cord, but there’s no disdain or disgust. Just clinical observation. Then: “I don’t enjoy owing people favours, as you probably already know.”

“Yes,” Jughead squeaks, and promptly wants to disappear into the ground. He’s always figured Veronica’s dad would be significantly more intimidating than her, which is anxiety inducing in itself because Veronica is _terrifying_ angry.

Mister Lodge raises one eyebrow slowly, and the look is so _Veronica_ Jughead relaxes a little. Just a little, though. “Veronica has brought it to my attention that I apparently owe _you_ something, Jughead.”

“The gift of life?” he says, before his brain catches up to his mouth. This was it, this was the end, Jesus Christ—

Mister Lodge actually _chuckles_. “If that’s how you choose to interpret it, then yes.” He fishes something out of his pocket and slides it across the sticky tabletop. “Miss Peabody will no longer be a problem for you, Mister Jones.”

It’s Penny’s cellphone. The one with all the videos of him moving that crate of drugs. It’s banged up and the screen is cracked, but it’s definitely hers.

Jughead feels himself pale and looks up into Mister Lodge’s dark eyes. “I—”

“You gave me something precious,” Mister Lodge says quietly, “when you convinced my daughter to give me a second chance. Even though you knew all that I had done. Even though you knew her concerns were justified.”

Jughead thinks of that moment in the classroom, of the lines in Veronica’s face, the sad downward tilt of her mouth, the way her voice had constantly been threatening to break. How soft and delicate and so un-Veronica she had looked sitting there. How she had taken him up on his offer to talk so easily.

How such a small moment had led to them blowing rings of smoke out into the cold, winter-crisp air some nights behind Pop’s, when their families were too much.

How he hadn’t really been able to stop thinking about the warmth in her eyes as she thanked him ever since.

“We can’t choose our parents,” he finally says, staring at his hands. “But we _can_ choose to love them. And she… she loves you more than anything. I didn’t want her to spend her life regretting if something happened and she didn’t give you a chance.”

“Neither did I.” Mister Lodge’s voice is strange, almost brittle, and when Jughead looks up he has an odd look on his face. Like he’s seeing Jughead for the first time. “Thank you, Jughead. You gave me my daughter back. And now,” he takes the phone back and slips it into his pocket, rising gracefully— Veronica’s whole family moves so fluidly, like water, like royalty, like predators, “I suppose, I’ve given you back your life.”

He really has, but Jughead can’t get his throat to work so he croaks out a, “my pleasure, Mister Lodge. Thanks.”

And tries not to pass out when the reply he gets is: “Feel free to come over for dinner any time.”

“But no Archie, right?” Because, clearly, Jughead has no survival instincts whatsoever. 

Mister Lodge outright laughs at that, and immediately looks younger. No wonder Veronica’s some kind of beauty queen (wait, what?), her parents are _gorgeous_. “That will be a discussion for another day.”

Jughead can’t help the quirk of his mouth. “Have a good one, Mister Lodge.”

“You as well, Torombolo.”

 _Oh my God,_ he thinks after the doors have clinked shut and Alice Cooper, who’d apparently been lurking in the shadows for the whole exchange, comes storming over to his table, _her family gave me a goddamn nickname._

It is, unsurprisingly, not the worst thing in the world.

.  
.  
.

He catches her in the hallway, outside that same classroom, a week later. He’s there to finally talk to Betty about what, exactly, she’d done to get Cheryl to testify for his dad, because something about how Cheryl had said, “keep your promise,” had felt so sad and defeated and entirely unlike her that it worried him. It’d been worrying him for weeks. It worried him what Betty was capable of, sometimes. What he might have turned her into.

But Betty hadn’t been at Vixens practice, or the Blue and Gold, or anywhere in the school and when he’d looked out the window to see if he could spot her mother’s car — who’d, for the record, interrogated him for an hour about Mister Lodge and threatened to ban him from seeing Betty ever again if he didn’t tell her what exactly was going on and, apparently, didn’t know they’d broken up (again) — he’d seen her and Archie, walking together, shoulders bumping. Laughing.

That old anxiety had reared its ugly head again, then, and he’d stormed off, ready to leave Shitdale High behind and go home. But then he’d spotted Veronica in the hall, throwing her Vixens uniform into her locker, her hair pulled up in a sloppy ponytail, and the gentle curve of her neck had made him stop. And now here he is, gaping at a girl he barely knows ( _but that’s a lie, isn’t it?_ ) who had gone out of her way to change his life for the better.

“Jughead?” She raises an eyebrow at him, hip cocked. A stray piece of ink-black hair falls into her eyes. “B just left, if you’re looking for her.”

“I was looking for you, actually,” he says, which, _what_? But maybe it isn’t a lie. Maybe he’d just been trying to find an excuse to possibly run into her. “Your dad talked to me the other day.”

He watches the whole line of her body go taught, knuckles clenched against the edge of her locker. “Oh?” She’s casual about it and she’s a good actress, he’ll give her that, but he knows better. He’s always known better, in some way, when it came to her. “He didn’t threaten you, did he?”

The ice in her voice — she’s bordering on angry, but not at him. She’s so protective of the people she surrounds herself with, even someone like him. She’d be a good Serpent, he thinks absently. All loyalty and fierceness and a solid right hook (according to Josie, at least). “No, actually, in some weird Twilight Zone-esque twist of events, he _thanked_ me.” He raises his eyebrows. “And told me not to worry about Penny anymore.”

“Huh.” She closes her locker slowly and won’t look at him. “How… odd.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” _when it comes to me,_ “which is hilarious considering your parents are _businessmen_.”

Veronica scowls, pushing loose hair behind her ears. He can’t stop staring at the way her neck slopes, the skin smooth and slightly paler than the rest of her. “I—”

“Thank you.” He takes two steps closer to her, but he’s still so far away. “Seriously, Veronica. You didn’t have to do that, and I don’t know what possessed you to, but thank you.”

Veronica turns slowly, the movement effortless even as she does it in spiked six inch heels. Her face is hesitant and slack, the swell of her bottom lip caught behind her teeth. Jughead swallows. “I don’t know what possessed me either.”

 _Glad we’re on the same page,_ Jughead thinks. For some reason, standing her in the hall with her, with three feet between them and a sheen of sweat on her forehead, he feels like he’s suffocating. Like he’s burning up. It’s just like it was in the parking lot, in the classroom, in the cafeteria. All the times before.

“C’mon, Elvira,” her eyes are sharp on him when he says it, “I think I owe my knight in shining Prada a burger.”

She makes an undignified sound that catches somewhere between a snort and a laugh and finally closes the distance between them to curl her hand around the crook of his arm. She’s so tiny, he sometimes forgets. She barely reaches his shoulder.

“Lead the way, Princess,” she mutters, her mouth curling affectionately. Jughead, breath stuttering, does just that.


End file.
